We Face Forward: out of Africa comes the art of noise

The dynamic, chaotic culture of a continent on the move is captured in London
2012 Festival's 'We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today', the biggest
survey of West African art seen in Britain to date, writes Mark Hudson.

Nnenna Okore, When the Heavens meet, 2011.Photo: Jonathan Greet / October Gallery, London

When Emeka Ogboh's sound installation 'Lagos–Oshodi' was premiered in Helsinki last year, a passing Nigerian man thought he was having an out of body experience. "He hadn't been home for some years," says Ogboh, "and when he heard the sounds of a Lagos market in a street in Finland, he went into a kind of mental crisis."

Ogboh is Nigeria's – possibly Africa's – first sound artist, and his works, which transplant what he calls "field recordings" into radically different locations, are designed to disconcert. In June he will carry the clamour of one of Nigeria's impromptu street markets into Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens as part of 'We Face Forward', the biggest survey of West African art seen in Britain to date and one of the centrepieces of London 2012 Festival.

Standing in the kind of teeming urban environment dealt with in Ogboh's work, you could be forgiven for thinking that Africa just doesn't change: the honking vehicles churning up dust, the milling crowds of commuters, hawkers and loiterers. Dropping in and out of Africa over the decades, as I've had the opportunity to do, it sometimes feels as though the same middle–aged woman is always there, squatting at the kerbside with her merchandise, wearing the same stoic expression.

Yet these appearances are deceptive. Africa is on the move. Economic growth has created a huge upsurge of artistic activity in China and India, and if Africa's anticipated economic miracle looks as though it could be some time coming, the continent's art is already everywhere in the global art market. While it may still be news to some in the West that Africa has a thriving contemporary art scene, there have been huge developments in this area since independence. In the Fifties and Sixties, Africa's first "modern artists" looked towards traditional masks and sculpture to create an idealised sense of the African past in reaction to the widely held view that Africa had no culture. Now a new generation is emerging who take the greatness of traditional art for granted, and positively revel in the messiness and chaotic creativity of the urban African experience: traffic jams, rubbish tips, bus stations and the sound of CNN blaring from outdoor bars.

The use and re–use of materials is a common theme, not as matter of ecological idealism, but a deeply ingrained and often highly creative survival strategy. Benin's Romuald Hazoume, one of Africa's best known artists, works almost entirely with one material, plastic jerry cans, slicing their tops off and adapting them into surreal face–like forms. "Ninety per cent of people in my country use petrol smuggled from Nigeria in these jerry cans," he says. The fact that the cans are worn thin to make them hold more means that these luckless petrol "mules" are literally bombs on wheels.

While it might seem banal to relate Hazoume's sculptures to traditional masks, he freely admits the connection. "My grandfather made ritual masks. Now I'm adapting the tradition using materials that reflect the corruption and malfunctioning of Africa today."

Manchester's links with Africa run deep. In 1945, the city played host to the 5th Pan–African Congress, in which many of Africa's future leaders met to set an agenda for the continent. Among them was Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, who made the statement on which this exhibition's title is based: "We face neither East nor West: we face forward." While many of post–independence Africa's shining hopes have been trashed, creativity seems more crucial than ever to the continent's development.

"We Face Forward" takes its impetus from collections in Manchester's museums relating to the industry that made the city great: cotton. The brilliantly patterned cotton prints we think of as typically African were originally designed and made in Manchester. Local companies conducted early market research and responded to the tastes of African women.

It's appropriate then that fashion should play a prominent role in the exhibition. At the Platt Fashion Gallery, London–based Nigerian designer Duro Olowu, whose work is worn by Michelle Obama, will respond to the works of vintage African studio photographers. Africa's bestknown artist, Ghana's El Anatsui, creates spectacular wall–filling installations of glittering "material", formed from foil bottle tops sewn together with wire, while his former pupil Nnenna Okore pulls apart and manipulates burlap sacking so it becomes a material as fluid and expressive as paint.

But alongside the beauty of traditional textiles, there is the vast tonnage of discarded clothes dumped on Africa by the West. In 'Bosnia, Angola, Rwanda', Malian artist Abdoulaye Konate pays tribute to the victims of those conflicts, contrasting the dignity of four locally woven shrouds with piles of useless garments – single shoes and broken glasses – deposited in Africa by Western donors. "These things leave Europe as rubbish," he says drily. "And they're still rubbish when they get here."

'We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today', is at Manchester Art Gallery and other venues, June 2 to September 16. wefaceforward.org